Ministry and monarchy

The gain in individual rights that came with the Enlightenment and the Emancipation, ironically enough, reduced the Jewish community's sense of collective autonomy and impaired its sense of political independence. For much of the Diaspora until around the 15th Century the qehillah enjoyed a semblance of political autonomy so long as rulers believed political rights were lodged in the community and not in the individual. Jewish leadership could exercise a measure of control over their own polity. The qehillah had the unenviable task of creating the frame of autonomy and sovereignty within the context of exile and servility but they managed it somehow. It would be not unfair to say ancient Israel was about gaining autonomy, while medieval, Diaspora Israel was about resisting servility. 

With the rise of the European nation-state state bureaucrats were encouraged to begin to encroach on the administrative prerogatives of the qehillah. At the same time, ordinary Jews began to wish to opt out of the qehillah and instead to opt in as citizens of the host state. As that ability to exercise the prerogatives of Jewish leadership began to weaken, the qehillah's lay and rabbinic leadership began to flail around for alternatives. Ultra-Orthodoxy was one attempt at a solution; and ultra-Orthodoxy failed. It's possible that this failure of ultra-Orthodoxy accounts for the Jewish people's role in the Genocide. 

By politicizibng halacha, Ultra-Orthodoxy placed the minister in a position of monarch and situated the ancient world priest's surrogate, the rabbinic leader, into the position of surrogate for the ancient world's monarchical leader, the rosh qehillah. It could be the ultra-Orthodox had no sophisticated political sense of how to deal with the challenges of exilic rule. It could be that therefore the rabbinic leadership were not careful to keep the ministry and the monarchy separate and because of their lack of care, their followership became subject to the exterminationist hatred that was the Genocide. Put another way, the ultra-Orthodox's response to the Emancipation was a fumbling politicization of halakha. But politics and halakha was ill-advised in the Diaspora. The host country’s rulers didn’t want it; nor did God want it. If the ultra-Orthodox needed to re-introduce politics into the halakhic process, it should have done so in the context of a nation-state situated in the Promised Land. Seeing as how the Jewish leadership refused to return to the Promised Land despite the urgings either of the Zionists or the collective will of the Jewish people, God performed in Europe what he only threatened to do in the wilderness in Moshe's time – He eradicated the Jewish people. 

Confounding ministry with monarchy and daring to institute politics in the Diaspora were the two great, fatal violations the ultra-Orthodox leadership perpetrated against their people and against their God. These were violations of hubris. That hubris came out of the Talmudic usurpation of biblical law.